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Monthly Archives: June 2010

I only have one pair of shorts. The pair is also nearly the only non-undergarmet article of my clothing that wasn’t previously owned. It’s a pair of athletic shorts I bought during the week and a half that I wanted to play basketball with my friends because I had nothing better going on in my life. That was a bad summer. All summers suck. I hate the heat. I get dehydrated easily. This is the furthest south I’ve lived in the summer. This is the hottest summer of my life. Fuck New York. I’ve started drinking Gatorade all the time to try to maintain a decent level of electrolytes.

Fuck New York.

New York is making my look like a douche – Wearing athletic shorts and drinking large containers of Gatorade.

There was a douche in my nerdiest math class who wore the same outfit and drank the same thing while he didn’t take notes because he was “too smart for that.” I hated him. I was usually the kid who was too smart to take notes, but this class was fucking impossible. This was Number Theory with Bressoud. Known for being one of the hardest math classes at my school. There were only 7 guys in the class and I was the least nerdy by far. Not by far. By so far that I couldn’t even see the next least nerdy person if we were lined up on the nerd spectrum. I was suddenly the stupidest person in class. My weekly Risk games made me seem cool because I had three friends to play Risk with.

One of these kids way less cool than me and way smarter than me was Jacob. Jacob also liked weightlifting. He was a douche. He would chug 24 ounces of Gatorade every class period in the midst of answering questions I was struggling with. UGH.

I wasn’t jealous of him. He had a really depressing life. He had 4 facebook friends (the true sign of coolness), and I had only ever seen him hanging out with one person: his girlfriend – who was almost as depressing as him – and they broke up at some point, so his life must have sucked. I wasn’t jealous of him. I was confused about myself when I was around him.

Socially, I’ve never considered myself a success. I’ve never cared to be one, so that’s okay. I wear clothes I find comfortable, I am mean the first time I meet people, I don’t censor my masturbation talk. I’m not a social success. What do I have over this Jacob kid though? Not my intellect. Not my athletic abilities. But I’m definitely better. I know that. So I must be better then him somehow, and social prowess is my last avenue to blame. I don’t want to only have my social abilities to rely on to prove that I’m better than somebody. I don’t care about society. Fuck society… No. Fuck him for making me embrace society.

I’m gonna get on a subway, go to some woman’s house, and spend an hour with her explaining that adding negative numbers is the same as subtracting. I’m gonna walk away with $45.

I’ve spent weeks rehearsing, discussing, advertising and writing/re-writing what I think is a brilliant sketch show that analyzes sex, bodies, grossness, and me sucking tits. It’s really fucking clever and smart and every other good adjective I can come up with. I will make far less than $45.

People don’t respect comedy. No comedy movie wins at the Oscars, yet it is the hardest art to create. It is the only art where you are forced to get a reaction at the time of presenting it, otherwise you’ve failed. Nobody watches a comedy, sits stoically throughout and then goes home and says “I think I can see where they were coming from, that was really great.” If you weren’t laughing, it wasn’t succeeding. And yet, laughter can’t be the point. Good comedy means you were presenting something interesting, something relatable, something that will cause people to think, but as a side note you are forcing a guttural reaction from your audience. No other art has as hard a task, yet comedy still refuses to be acknowledged as difficult.

We’re charging $10/ticket ($7 online) and that is the most we have ever or will ever charge. Theatery plays get to charge $20-40 a ticket. An hour of me telling you that standard deviation and standard error are different costs $45. This world doesn’t understand what’s difficult. I think we still pay people to do the things that we don’t want to do. We all want to do comedy, we all want to make people laugh, so we refuse to admit that what people are doing is too hard for us. No one has any desire to discuss the normal curve or research Brechtian methods of dealing with a monologue about homosexuality in the 1950s, so we pretend that the reason we don’t do it is because it’s too hard.

It’s always been my problem with teaching math. I never feel like I’m doing anything because most of my job is just therapist – convincing the person that they can do math and that they should try. Well, I’m taking the opposite approach with comedy. You can’t do comedy, it’s really fucking hard. All those people that have been laughing at your jokes are just being polite, and weird voices are not actually funny.

I’m a liberal. I’m also surrounded by liberals. The thing I think we are accused of that is most valid is that we love the victim. I don’t see anything wrong with that though. Rooting for the underdog is fun.

What does piss me off is when people decide they are rooting for the underdog, but don’t actually do any research as to who the good underdog is.

I like Betty White fine. She’s a funny lady. She has had this huge spike in popularity lately though because people have decided it’s cool to like old women who can be funny – as though its soooooo rare and she’s the only one. Sure, Joan Rivers has gotten some of the praise she’s deserved as part of this oldwoman fever, but where’s the love for Phyllis Diller? Bitch was fucking hilarious and she was old when she was on the Ed Sullivan show. She’s now 93 and is a constant on Comedy Central roasts being much dirtier and funnier than Betty White’s “hilariously offensive” stuff on SNL.

I don’t want to say negative things about Betty White, I just feel like this hype is undeserved and she’s become the poster girl for old women doing comedy despite the fact that she’s.. eh. Her SNL was not the best SNL of the season, Baldwin’s was. She is not the reason women were allowed into comedy, Joan Rivers is. She’s not the only old lady willing to make a joke about her twat, a lot of people are.

People think that olden times were such different times, and in a lot of ways they were. Fewer offensive things were allowed on television, and Lenny Bruce, and to a much lesser extent George Carlin helped that, but that doesn’t mean the people were that different. People still fucked. People still felt awkward about fucking. People still masturbated and felt self loathing. People were people and we forget that.

So my advice is next time you see an old person tell them a dirty joke and discuss with them the shame you felt last time you tickled your twat or played with your penis. They’ll love it. And they probably have better stories about it than you.

The other day I burned my finger pulling a muffin out of the toaster. I only touched the muffin, but the muffin was so hot that it created a large blister of burning on my thumb. I’m not going to talk anymore about how I fingered a hot muffin because I have important other things to talk about. I thought this was the worst pain I could deal with because I am a large festering bag of unable to deal with pain.

Yesterday I went to Coney Island for the Mermaid Parade. That’s right – Mermaid Parade. I usually hate parades. This was awesome. I am now literally in the worst pain someone can be in though because I am also a festering bag of stupid unpreparedness. My face is bright red, my arms are bright red, and my dick is bright red too because I comfort myself and distract myself from pain with pleasure.

Why am I writing this? Because I wanted to give you the context under which I could make a bunch of inappropriate or stupid jokes about my situation.

1. I can’t imagine anyone who has a worse life than me. At least those people in Darfur can’t get sunburned.

2. This is the most apeeling my arms have ever been. Because I have very little muscle mass and the skin on my arms is peeling.

3. I’m in so much pain that I leave a trail of tears wherever I go – like a redskin.

4. I hated rednecks so much in high school, but now I stand in redfaced embarrassment because I am one of them. Because I’m poor.

5. Here’s a love poem. Roses are red, I’m more red, why do roses get all the credit for being red? Have you seen me lately? I’m really red! I’m way redder than roses. This is bullshit, stop talking about roses, use me in your love poems!!

I feel like I should write about Alvin Greene winning the Democratic nomination in South Carolina. I really have nothing to say. I still feel like I have to say something because this is about a person who is being hated on for not campaigning the way the establishment wants him to campaign when he should really be hated on because he’s a moron who can’t answer questions without looking like he’s doing a bad Michael Cera impression talking to a girl.

Not calling him a moron isn’t a matter of political correctedness, I tend to think that there is a certain level of PC that is necessary in order to make discussions productive and not have them turn into emotional yelling matches because people were offended. This is a matter of tactfulness, and tactfulness is stupid.

Getting offended over someone being politically incorrect is somewhat valid – you are not simply defending yourself, you are defending a race, gender, group of people who identify with something that was just reduced to a stereotype. Getting offended about a lack of tact is stupid. That’s just getting defensive because someone made fun of you. Deal with it. People may not like you, but that is one person’s opinion of one person. I think Alvin Greene is an idiot. I don’t think he was planted. I don’t think that the way he campaigned shows some destruction of our political system. I think he’s stupid. Him. Alvin Greene is dumb – that has nothing to do with some larger conspiracy or with some generalization we can make about anybody. Alvin Greene is his own person, and that person is not a bright person.

People don’t want to say that. People want to say “I don’t think he’s dumb, I just think it’s confusing how he got nominated” or “It’s not that he’s a bad person, it just doesn’t make sense because this is not how things are done.” NOOOO! He’s a dumb, bad person. Maybe not a bad person. He’s dumb. That’s fine. We need dumb people to make me feel smart.

Alvin Greene makes us feel smart. If he could win the nomination, then who says I can’t be happy. I’m glad he won.

First of all, you should all check out my real writing gig and like it or share it or digg it or tweet it or shirk it or jazz it or starburst it or whatever.

Secondly people hate getting made fun of. People like getting supported. People think these are in opposition. They are not. In my ideal world (aka: THE ideal world) everybody would get supported and made fun of. No, everybody would take insult as a form of support. I’ve said before that I my desire for attention does not often spill over into a desire to be liked. If people are paying attention to the fact that I’m talking/doing/being that is compliment enough and they need not show their support with facebook comments like: “YAY!!!” or “I <3 U” or “Whooo! Good! Positive!” I’m not saying that I hate that. I love hearing that people like my stuff too, I’m just saying that that isn’t the point (Except when I’m getting paid sort of based on how much people tweet/like/starburst my stuff).

Criticism is great. I love being told the flaws in what I do – sometimes it pushes me to do better, sometimes it pushes me further toward the thing that was supposedly hated, but either way it pushes me and I like to push it. Which reminds me that I am abnormally attracted to Salt-N-Pepa.

My last entry was about how I hated pretty much all of my friends because they are posers who only pretend to like the World Cup because it has the word “World” in it. Take it as a compliment because at least I’m paying attention to you. This is the one thing I like about capitalism: That buying something is your mark of support, not telling people you like it. You can buy something and pretend you hate it, but you are still supporting the creator with your purchase. Capitalism fucks over irony.

I get when people get excited about the Olympics despite having no knowledge of sports because it is a sport where you get to be patriotic in rooting for a team. I don’t do that, but I get it. The world cup is a soccer event. If you don’t watch or care about the MLS or any of the European soccer leagues, then you don’t get to care about the World Cup. I can maybe even understand if you get interested in all sports mildly and this is one that gets broadcast enough that you can pay attention, but don’t use the World Cup as your method of sounding tolerant of other cultures.

If you are from America the biggest sporting event is the Super Bowl. Biggest playoff season: March Madness. Not paying attention to those, but paying attention to the World Cup does not mean you are closer to international people, it means you are an asshole. You don’t care about the world cup, and that’s fine. You know who cares about the world cup in other countries – the same people who you think are dickheads who care too much about March Madness here. Soccer is not somehow a less bro-ey douchey sport than other sports. All sports weight physical abilities over intellectual ones, so those same bullies who beat you up in high school that made you hate Football players are playing Soccer and bullying around nerdy kids like you in England and Cameroon.

And you aren’t rooting for the underdog sport. You’re just joining a group of people who aren’t near you. You are identifying with people who you have no reason to identify with – you are posing. You are a poser. No. You are an asshole.

And don’t tell me that soccer is a more interesting sport. It’s not. Hockey is soccer, but faster and more interesting. Lacrosse is soccer with sticks and WAY cooler. Basketball is soccer with more strategy and cooler jumping. Half the games end in 1-1 ties in soccer. I’m not saying that you can’t find soccer fun (I used to play soccer), but I am saying that the only way you can find soccer enjoyable to watch is if you grew up in a culture where soccer was so ingrained that you watched it since you were sitting on a parent’s lap cheering because your daddy told you to. Which is the same reason anybody finds Baseball interesting – that shit is dull.

If you don’t like soccer, you don’t get to like the world cup. The Olympics are different. Nobody claims to think that track and field is interesting. People watch the coverage of the Olympics more than the games themselves and readily admit to that fact. People claim allegiance with teams from weird countries that they want to be like when it comes to the World Cup and I’m tired of it. Fuck you, you posing asshole piece of shit – you don’t like the world cup.